Attack of the One-Letter Programming Languages

snydeq writes: The programming world is fast proliferating with one-letter programming languages, many of which tackle specific problems in ways worthy of a cult following, writes InfoWorld's Peter Wayner in this somewhat tongue-in-cheek roundup of the more interesting entrants among this trend. "They're all a bit out there, with the possible exception of C. ... Each offers compelling ideas that could do the trick in solving a particular problem you need fixed.'"

Comments

Web Searches For These Suck

[Anonymous Coward]

I google R stuff all the time and it is a pain in the ass. Google has gotten a lot better recently (or I've been lucky).

Re:Web Searches For These Suck

[cyrus0101]

I google R stuff all the time and it is a pain in the ass. Google has gotten a lot better recently (or I've been lucky).

Adding "lang" to the end helps. It's a trend for non-single-letter languages (hacklang, golang, etc) but seems to work for R & C too.

Re:Web Searches For These Suck

[tehlinux]

Just search stackoverflow.com with the tag [r].

http://stackoverflow.com/quest...

Re:Web Searches For These Suck

[Anonymous Coward]

"CLANG!"

Appropriate. Sounds like my head hitting the keyboard when I'm working in C.

"JAVASCRIPTLANG" is a more guttural sound. Like I'm vomiting into the wastebasket in my cubicle. Also appropriate.

+1 informative. I'll try that.. Wonder if "c#lang" works better than 'cpound'.

Re:Web Searches For These Suck

[Shadow of Eternity]

Which at least helps with finding things about R, but doesn't help with the fact R is an enormous pain in the ass if you learned to use it from the kind of person that still thinks like they're using SPSS or STATA.

Re:Web Searches For These Suck

[Opportunist]

Agreed. It's worse than looking for The Who (which Google, btw, finally realized can be more than two words to be omitted from a search because they're too common).

With C you at least have C++ (also something Google realized is a search term that people might want to look for), but R (and S) are very obviously not interesting enough for enough people to warrant some kind of preferential treatment.

Re:Web Searches For These Suck

[umafuckit]

I thought the whole point of SPSS was that you didn't have to think?

Re:Web Searches For These Suck

[Arancaytar]

(which Google, btw, finally realized can be more than two words to be omitted from a search because they're too common)

Yeah, in the early days multiple words were just an AND keyword search. I think that changed over 6-7 years ago, though.

Re:Web Searches For These Suck

[jcdr]

The open source PCB board layout tool has the same problem: It's called "pcb".

Like KiCad ?

Re:Web Searches For These Suck

[plopez]

I never have problems with "R statistical"

Re: Web Searches For These Suck

[plopez]

The last programming Language I can think of which was whitespace dependent was Fortran 77. And whitespace dependence was removed as soon as possible in Fortran 90.

Welcome to the 70's!

Re:Web Searches For These Suck

[langelgjm]

Concur that my initial Googling for R topics was sometimes frustrating. But lately I've had little difficulty. Stackoverflow or the R mailing list archive are usually the top results. Not sure if I've adjusted or what.

My experience is that if you have any experience programming, R makes far more sense than other common packages, like Stata or SPSS. After all, it's an actual programming language. My biggest adjustment was learning how to not use loops.

Don't even get me started on SAS.

Re: Web Searches For These Suck

[TapeCutter]

C-sharp was already taken in the late 80's, as was "D-flat", both were windowing libraries for DOS. Can't remember if it was Dr Dobb's or Byte magazine that published them.

Re:Web Searches For These Suck

[Wootery]

Yup, that's exactly why they chose "Clang" as the name for the C frontend for LLVM.

Re: Web Searches For These Suck

[salesgeek]

You can have indentation problems or you can have mismatched, nested grouping symbol problems. Either way you go, there's problems. Personally, I just like readable code. You can have that either way.

Re: Web Searches For These Suck

[dintech]

You should try Q and K.. http://kx.com/software-downloa...

Re: Web Searches For These Suck

[jythie]

Everything old is new again. Pretty much everything we see in tech is people rediscovering things done decades ago and trying them again.

Re:Web Searches For These Suck

[istartedi]

Google desperately needs a "yes, just like I typed it" button. It also needs a way to exclude the almost entirely pointless "this page links to another page with your keywords in it" results. It also needs a way to detect that the search terms no longer appear in the linked page because it's a dynamically generated page and... do the PhDs at Google know what "dynamic" means?

In short, Google has lots of weaknesses in something that's supposed to be its core competency. We just need the right start-up to disrupt them.

Re: Web Searches For These Suck

[sconeu]

D-Flat was named that because C-Sharp was taken. It was published in Dr. Dobbs by Al Stevens.

Of course, the fact that C-Sharp was an existing windowing library didn't bother Microsoft at all, when naming their language.

Re:Web Searches For These Suck

[q4Fry]

Google desperately needs a "yes, just like I typed it" button.

Use double quotes around words or phrases you want "as typed."

Re:Web Searches For These Suck

[cellocgw]

Yeah, I generally google for "CRAN R" or "bioconductor R" to narrow down the field a bit.

Or you could just skim StackOverflow for the "R" tag.

Re:Web Searches For These Suck

[njnnja]

Agreed. But my biggest adjustment was learning how to read code that I wrote 3 months ago not using loops.

Re:Web Searches For These Suck

[istartedi]

I'm thinking of the opposite problem--Google's too smart for your own good parsing.

It's been a while since I googled my own userid. The last time I did that Google seemed very intent on parsing it out. It was returning all the "i started" links and it was a PiTA to get rid of them. Of course since I've said that, I just tried and it wasn't as bad as I recalled.

Re:Web Searches For These Suck

[Shadow of Eternity]

See the problem with R is that a lot of departments requiring it aren't teaching it as a programming language, they're trying to teach it like it's SPSS with a command line. Nobody ever learns what's actually going on under the hood or how to actually manipulate the data, they just know that hitting buttons in the right order SHOULD make it do a regression.

Re:Web Searches For These Suck

[unixisc]

Ain't Clang short for 'C-language'?

Re:Web Searches For These Suck

[kat_skan]

You can add a search engine to your browser for verbatim search:

http://www.google.com/search?tbs=li:1&q=%s

Re:Web Searches For These Suck

[Wootery]

Yes, that's what I meant, but I should've been clearer :P

Re: Web Searches For These Suck

[gzuckier]

Who the fuck uses R? Use something else, like python.

pirates.

These days I write in P

[l0ungeb0y]

It is Winter after all

Re:These days I write in P

[zippthorne]

It's not winter yet. Although winter is coming.

Re:These days I write in P

[ChunderDownunder]

Huh, it's almost summer where I live.

We even played cricket in the park today.

Re:These days I write in P

[webnut77]

These days I write in P

That explains the yellow snow.

Re:These days I write in P

[sconeu]

Watch out where the huskies go!

Don't bother using if you aren't a feminist.

[Anonymous Coward]

Only SJWs are allowed to contribute to free software.

http://slashdot.org/submission...

Boring spelling correction

[theanorak]

it's "tongue-in-cheek", not "tongue-and-check".

Re:Boring spelling correction

[Anonymous Coward]

Allow me to play doubles advocate here for a moment. For all intensive purposes I think you are wrong. In an age where false morals are a diamond dozen, true virtues are a blessing in the skies. We often put our false morality on a petal stool like a bunch of pre-Madonnas, but you all seem to be taking something very valuable for granite. So I ask of you to mustard up all the strength you can because it is a doggy dog world out there. Although there is some merit to what you are saying it seems like you have a huge ship on your shoulder. In your argument you seem to throw everything in but the kids Nsync, and even though you are having a feel day with this I am here to bring you back into reality. I have a sick sense when it comes to these types of things. It is almost spooky, because I cannot turn a blonde eye to these glaring flaws in your rhetoric. I have zero taller ants when it comes to people spouting out hate in the name of moral righteousness. You just need to remember what comes around is all around, and when supply and command fails you will be the first to go. Make my words, when you get down to brass stacks it doesn't take rocket appliances to get two birds stoned at once. It's clear who makes the pants in this relationship, and sometimes you just have to swallow your prize and accept the facts.

Re: Boring spelling correction

[Anonymous Coward]

Well said.

Except the "intensive purposes" part.

Useless rant of an article

[gewalker]

Although one letter language names have issues for search (as do other generic terms, or other stupid names like .Net), the only useful point is that some programmers like to use less-popular languages and may introduce them into your codebase confusing other developers. Of course you can hire more developers that speak the obscure language in your shop if it is otherwise well-known.

Of course, we already know about that problem. It matters not if the obscure language (for your shop) happens to be R, F#, awk, java, python, etc. with longer and longer names.

For any new language, adoption is a problem. Interesting languages like Eiffel, Smalltalk, etc. never really made the big-time and never will.

Sometimes, you have to choose the obscure language. Javascript being a good example -- as the well started to become dynamic, decent Javascript developers were in very high-demand because there was no real alternative.

Re:Useless rant of an article

[gweihir]

For any new language, adoption is a problem. Interesting languages like Eiffel, Smalltalk, etc. never really made the big-time and never will.

The reason is simple: Most of today's programmers are not very good at their job. They just do not get what makes these languages impressive and exceptionally effective. As soon as programming is recognized as a very demanding engineering task that actually requires the best and brightest (and that using them pays off handsomely), this will change. Of course, that realization may never materialize.

J (You can type more than that for your subject.)

[50000BTU_barbecue]

I guess I could type more for my subject, but when the subject is one-letter languages, get off my case, eh?

If I understood more math, I'd enjoy using J, the "normal keyboard" version of APL

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...

one letter

[bugs2squash]

"Each offers compelling ideas that could do the trick in solving a particular problem you need fixed"

except the most byzantine one-letter language: C++

APL: A Programming Language

[Required Snark]

The article is shallow and dumb. It does not even mention the inventor of APL, Ken Iverson, even though two of the languages in the article are based on APL.

APL was not invented by IBM to be terse. It was invented by Iverson as a notation to describe array operations, and he published a book about it before he went to IBM.

This is just lazy journalism. The guy who wrote it got a stupiod idea, spent insufficient time doing research, wrote something trivial in even less time and screwed up his facts.

He gets an "I" for idiot.

Re:APL: A Programming Language

[BlackHawk-666]

I swear, the "articles" are getting more idiotic every year. This stuff is of the level you'd expect on one of those 'Top x About y' sites.

Re:APL: A Programming Language

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because it's exactly what you're meant to read. The tech equivalent of Cracked. "5 Reasons Why SystemD Causes Cancer," "4 Ways that (VI or EMACS) is better than (VI or EMACS)," ad nauseam.

Editors at Slashdot have two jobs. One is to post the articles they're paid to post (i.e. all of those blatant product placement articles we've been seeing for years, long before DICE). The other job is to post things that you're likely to click on, since the likelihood of you clicking a link is what they're selling...that and ad space. As one person put it, to paraphrase, the best way to get the right answer to a question on the Internet isn't to ask the question, it's to give out the wrong answer and wait to be corrected. They've even got people like you covered. People like you, who by rights probably shouldn't even be reading this site for how much you hate what it's turned into...yet you're reading it anyway, why? The marketing WORKS, that's why. It works well enough that people who hate the site still wind up coming back here anyway, if only to re-iterate just how much they don't like Slashdot...as if it matters why you visited. It only matters THAT you visited, why hasn't been important in a long time.

So then, next time you're feeling some cognitive dissonance about the way Slashdot is run, consider the following; it's no different than the way it's always been run and in a way, it's more competent than you think. It's a "pretend" sort of incompetence designed to reel in the last handfuls of potential visitors by literally insulting their intelligence, until they feel the need to actually post here in order to feel superior again.

Your weakness is their revenue stream.

Re:APL: A Programming Language

[menkhaura]

APL would be strictly a zero-letter programming language, right? A language which shall not be named? Just "a programming language".

Re:APL: A Programming Language

[Kazoo the Clown]

The terseness of APL was a HUGE advantage for interactive programming when baud rates were, like 135. And I loved that its keyboard actually had real multiply and divide symbols rather than co-opting the asterisk and slash. The pictographic character set visually reflected the operations in many cases. It's decendant J, unfortunately sports none of those advantages and programs look like they are displayed on a terminal with its baud rate set wrong.

Re:APL: A Programming Language

[Dishwasha]

If you had read and then comprehended the very first paragraph, you would have quickly realized this article's target audience does not include you or anybody else here on this board.

Re:bullcrap

[Half-pint HAL]

Machine code is like a fixie. Powerful when used in the appropriate setting, but hipsters use it in all the wrong places to try and look cool.

D is not bad

[bytesex]

If only it were free.

Re:D is not bad

[serviscope_minor]

If only it were free.

Aren't there GCC and LLVM D compilers now?

Re:D is not bad

[Carewolf]

If only it were free.

Unfortunately while it isn't bad, it doesn't have any real killer features that would make you bother with it compared to C++. I like to play with it, but I wouldn't risk using it for anything serious.

Re:D is not bad

[serviscope_minor]

Unfortunately while it isn't bad, it doesn't have any real killer features that would make you bother with it compared to C++. I like to play with it, but I wouldn't risk using it for anything serious.

Pretty much this. It's like C++ on steroids with much better templating, and while it seems much nicer, there's not all that much it makes vastly better. Also, there was a version 1 which is now deprecated and now a version 2. the nice thing about C++ is the standards body try really REALLY hard to not break anyone's code from version to version. That is very valuable for long running projects.

Looking at D, it came out in 2001 and is on its second major version. I was working on a library still in reasonably use recently, and found comments from 2002 (before it was put into version control), so just that library is as old as the D language.

The code from 2002 is fine and I do like not having to rewrite code.

One letter?

[rrohbeck]

Here I was wondering how to program with one letter where even Brainfuck needs several.

Re:One letter?

[Arancaytar]

Unary representation of your program's Gödel number. You can code in one letter, but your program may get pretty long.

Re:One letter?

[smallfries]

That's not one letter, that's multiple uses of the same letter. What you really need is a language of finite size and a really big alphabet.

Re:One letter?

[ChrisMaple]

Alternatively, use the Morse technique. The time between keypress and release determines dot or dash; The time from release to press separates the letters thus encoded.

Four Lettered Languages

[Champaklal]

... were a bit pain for writing machine learning code. R simplified it, but only to an extent where the file size wasn't too big. Java and C# still provide the best solution when it comes to solving big data problems. Also, Hive / Pig is the best one to work on distributed clusters.

Re:Four Lettered Languages

[dolmen.fr]

Perl? Ruby?

Re:Four Lettered Languages

[Ford Prefect]

I think most people would agree PHP is a four-letter word.

The logic of the fun

[jcdr]

What's more fun ?

1) Hello World! Today I publish a shiny new programming language that is better at XYZ compared to anything out there. Joint me and contribute.

2) Hello mailing list, this is the patches set version 18 of my 3 years effort trying to integrate the XYZ feature into the project. I hope this version address all the remaining complains about it.

3) Dear Steering Committee F.0x55/C-75, please find in attachment the version 24 of the 137 pages document "Proposal for adding feature XYZ" to the agenda for the next 10 years cycle of standardization.

Re:The logic of the fun

[weilawei]

I hope this version address all the remaining complains about it.

I'd like to file a bug report. You misspelled "complaints". I look forward to seeing this issue fixed in your next patch set. ;)

In all seriousness, it's a good point. But.. but... shiny.. fancy.. squirrel!

Re: So many open questions

[Zontar The Mindless]

I call dibs on Æ, Ø, Œ, and Þ!

Hell, /. can't even do the whole Latin set. WTF?

Re:bullcrap

[Zontar The Mindless]

Sorry, pal--that argument's already been had, and won.

search +R

[raymorris]

Use a plus sign in front of the yerm you want to require. For example, search for "iteration +R"

Re:bullcrap

[Zontar The Mindless]

(And yes, when we need a site to explain XKCD comics, it's pretty strong evidence that the end is near.)

wrong too. Programmer vs knows a language

[raymorris]

That idea kind of wrong, too. For maintenance tasks, more than once I've sat down and fixed code without ever having seen the language before, sometimes without bothering to check which language it is. A decent programmer isn't going to have to much trouble maintaining any reasonable language. For example, a fence post error is a fence post error in any language, and the fix is always the same - use the value one less.

Re:J (You can type more than that for your subject

[Kazoo the Clown]

Yeah, as if APL wasn't cryptic enough, the J designers had to translate its pictographic character set into Multi-character ASCII gibberish.

Fortunately

[Virtucon]

There can only be 26 of them if we use the English Alphabet.

Re:Fortunately

[qvatch]

and we assume people won't just overlap on whim.

Re:Fortunately

[7-Vodka]

He also forgot about symbols and punctuation.

I call it right now. This is the name of my future language: " "
(I'll give you a hint, it's ascii 255, nbsp for short, or non-breaking space)

Personally

[clickety6]

Hah! Still stcuk using one letter lanaguages, hey?
Personally, I use (unpronounceable squiggly symbol) - the price of programming languages. Pain in the arse to google though.

Dr, Seuss

[ChrisMaple]

http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Zebra-Classic-Seuss/dp/0394800842/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1416926787&sr=8-1&keywords=on+beyond+zebra

Re:J (You can type more than that for your subject

[Lawrence_Bird]

I've always wanted to spend some time with APL but the learning curve was steep enough that I've never been able to block out sufficient time to make it worth starting.

Missing language: E

[NorthWay]

"E" is a pretty respectable language in the Pascal family(IIRC) that has it's home on the Amiga.See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...

And as comes as a surprise to absolutely nobody, Wikipedia already there links to two other languages called "E".

sad

[spacefem]

I thought "one letter programming language" would refer to the syntax, not the marketing name of the language.

what can keep me from ever having to type out the entire word "while" again?

That's mentioned in the docs, but actually still

[raymorris]

That usage is mentioned in the documentation:
https://support.google.com/web...

However, testing out a few queries, it seems to still work the same as it has for 20 years - requiring a term.

Quotes: synonyms and phrases

[raymorris]

I believe quotes require that exact phrase, in order. Traditionally, that is useful for multiple-word phrases. Since Google will by default include synonyms, quotes (exact phrase) can also be useful to avoid synonyms with even a single word quoted.

The plus sign appears to still require a specific word, as it always has. This is most useful when you want to search for what appears to be an unimportant word like "the" or you have many search terms and some terms are most important.

Re:J (You can type more than that for your subject

[Lawrence_Bird]

Thanks for the tips. Fortran has come a long way since then but from the code I have seen APL is one of the tersest languages out there. Is there such a thing as a long APL program? Game of life is one line (three if you comment).

Just another InfoWorld post by snydeq

[Art3x]

Just another InfoWorld post by the user snydeq.

Re: So many open questions

[gzuckier]

I'd like to call everyone's attention to my new, awesome programming language, named "The alchemical symbol symbol for borax"

Weird Basis

[rdnetto]

The premise of the article is just weird - an article about programming languages with single letter names makes about as much sense as an article about operating systems with blue logos. That D is compared to C instead of C++ further demonstrates the author's cluelessness. (Many D programmers regard D as an improved, non-backward compatible version of C++.)